Letter to TankTop.tv

After October’s Don’t Pitch Me.. event, I had a brief chat with the founders of tanktop.tv. I spent some time thinking their situation through, all of which ended up turning into this letter*, which is posted here with Liz Rice’s (co-founder) permission….

Hi,

Enjoyed your presentation last week – thanks. I think you have great possibilities. I’ve been thinking about it a little, and thought I would share some thoughts which might be of interest.

You may know of Joel Spolsky, a tech/entrepreneurial blogger (founder of StackOverflow). He gave a talk at another Meetup recently about the need to identify an essential characteristic of a startup, which he identifies as Amazon vs Ben & Jerrys – the nub of which is; land-grab, go-for-broke, market share at all costs, own the territory and worry about earnings later versus steady, organic growth, careful with the money, self-fund, focus on quality. He has it as a blog-post here.

The point is, that I think you need to decide which you are.

Further, my opinion is that you need to be huge.
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London OpenCoffee 31Oct’13

A straightforward social / networking event  in the cafe of UCL’s Roberts Engineering Building. I’d been warned that this can be a hit/miss event with small turnouts, but today’s was great for me. I would guess there were 15 or so people, most of whom I didn’t get around to speaking to, so no complaints from me.

I ended up having a good chat with a guy called Kishan who wasn’t intentionally attending – just happened to be working on his laptop in the corner where we congregated. Turned out he works with the UCL Advances team, which supports startups from UCL staff and students, but also works with external entrepreneurs.

He showed me a UX application he was working on that allows sample users to work naturally, in their own time, rather than coming in to an artificial ‘lab’ setting. They use the camera on a smart device or laptop and record the user’s voice as well as recording all screen interactions. Back-end number crunching gives analytics.

As it happened, I had arranged to meet Liz from tanktop.tv there, and they are looking for some UX testing and stats, so things worked out rather neatly.

A lighter weight commitment than the evening events I’ve attended, but none the worse for that.

EVENT RATING: Good – go again.

Don’t Pitch Me… Oct ’13

An event nicely tuned to allow early-stage startups to show and tell without being under pressure to sell themselves hard – the idea being that they are looking for constructive feedback from the attendees rather than collaborators or investors, with equal time allowed for presentation and Q&A for each slot. The evening is structured to allow lots of time for networking, both before and after the presentations.

Each of the four presentations made me sit up and think, which is obviously to a large degree down to the discrimination of the organisers, the cheerful and effective Three Beards, but also suggests the incredible fertility of the startup scene, and the enormous range of smart/ingenious/useful/revelatory wrinkles that are still to be shaken from the unfolding digital fabric.

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Tech Debate: “Equity vs. Salary for co-Founders”

This Developers & Entrepreneurs Meetup wasn’t actually my first. Over the last couple of years, I have been to a couple of other similar events. Nevertheless, it’s the first one I’m going to write about here, so I’m grateful it was a good one!

This wasn’t a ‘pitching’ event, but a well managed discussion around a fairly well-defined topic. We heard from two speakers about their own very different experiences in finding their co-founders, and what sort of conversations and agreements they had come up with  (Jose Bort of pickevent.com and Kwesi Johnson of  Imakethathappen.com – both startups that have launched recently) .

Both were very open, and their stories were interesting, which got things off to a good start, and from then on there was a fairly free flow of contributions from around the room.

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Diving in…

As a newcomer to the London tech world, an outsider, coming from a resolutely nuts-and-bolts, deeply physical approach to my work in the field of architecture, I’m using this blog to record my activities, experiences, thoughts and ideas, plus excerpts of conversations with people I meet (always on the basis of explicit consent!).

Why am I here? Why am I doing this? Frankly, I am hoping that some of the things I say here will prove interesting to a few people so that my journey into the world of tech ideas, startups, entrepreneurs and investors will become more fruitful. As to why I’m here, it’s simple; I’m taking a step away from architecture, aiming to make a second career in the tech world [just using the abbreviation ‘tech’ is a sign that I’ve made some small move already – it is hard for me to use insider jargon without some sort of mental cringe – something I’m going to have to get used to…].

Yes, I’m another wannabe. I’m happy to admit it because, frankly, it would be foolish not to.

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